I'm bullish on the on-chain options space as a whole. Options have massive product market fit on the retail side, as evidenced by it being Robinhood's biggest trading revenue line, and on the institutional side based on how much global volume they do. It's also the biggest tradfi market that hasn't really seen material growth on-chain.
In crypto, perps have dominated because they're simple to understand and it's easy to build up liquidity on a trading pair. But perps are path dependent. You can be right about where something ends up and still get liquidated on the way there. Oct 10 was a good example of that, and I think it's made people a lot more interested in options, where you know your max loss going in.
On-chain options have been attempted before, but the models were subpar. We're now seeing teams build models that mirror centralized designs, which lets market makers provide liquidity on par with or better than Deribit. On-chain options also now benefit from perps liquidity, which makes it possible to offer RWA markets in a way that wasn't possible before.
This is one of the reasons I particularly like
$SYN.
Aside from being incredibly bullish on its founder
@trajan0x, I think the product itself is very compelling. Hypercall is built on top of Hyperliquid, so market makers can hedge there and use those same positions as margin. That means Hypercall can list options on anything with a Hyperliquid perp, whether that's majors, alts or the tokenized equities on TradeXYZ. You can already trade same-day and daily SpaceX options there, which you can't do on a traditional exchange, and the same will be true for pre-IPO names once Hyperliquid lists them. Anyone with a wallet can use it, it's USDC margined and it trades 24/7.
I think the token side of things is also very compelling.
• No equity entity, so all cash flows are governed by SYN
• No VCs and no unlocks, with 88% of supply circulating
• Builder codes for frontend revenue share
With the governance structure in mind, I'm including a proposal below to kick off value accrual for the token. It has three parts.
1) 70% of protocol fees go toward buying SYN on the open market on Hyperliquid. The SYN that gets bought is distributed to SYN stakers.
2) 30% of fees go to SLP, the USDC vault that provides market making liquidity on Hypercall. Rewards are time weighted so people can't deposit right before a distribution and farm it.
3) Traders who stake SYN get fee discounts from 5% up to 40%, similar to how Hyperliquid does its staking tiers. There's a 24 hour activation period and a 7 day unstaking cooldown. The SYN thresholds for each tier still need to be ratified by the DAO.
The split applies to fees actually collected, after discounts and builder/referral shares, and there are no new emissions.
The proposal is pending a DAO vote.
snapshot.org/#/s:synapse-gov…